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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/24530509">Home</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/speechwriter/pseuds/speechwriter'>speechwriter</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Series:</b></td><td>The Disappearances of Draco Malfoy [2]</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>F/M</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-06-04</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-06-04</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-18 08:34:42</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Not Rated</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>No Archive Warnings Apply</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>1,612</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/24530509</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/speechwriter/pseuds/speechwriter</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>It's strange for Harry, being home.</p><p>A short Disappearances fic from Harry's POV, around Ch. 14-15.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Harry Potter/Ginny Weasley, Hermione Granger/Draco Malfoy</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Series:</b></td><td>The Disappearances of Draco Malfoy [2]</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Series URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/series/1772842</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>14</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>172</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>Home</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><ul class="associations">
      <li>For <a href="https://archiveofourown.org/users/SillySparrow/gifts">SillySparrow</a>.</li>



    </ul></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>Even now, having been brought into the magical world, where ghosts were real, tangible things, Harry found himself toying with the idea of a haunting. Sometimes, in the late afternoons, he made excuses and went upstairs to the nursery, to the place he sometimes could have sworn he felt them there with him. Standing in the corner beside the crib, he felt a presence like a fray in the fabric of the everyday, an indeterminate glow, like the sun blazing through a sheet of thin stone. As much as Dumbledore had concealed, Harry knew he had spoken truthfully, too, when he’d suggested that those who’d been lost could be found if you looked for them—if you remembered them, if you felt for them in the present tense, if you stood in the corner of a room and turned your love for them over and over like a talisman. So maybe it was less that something of his parents lingered here. Maybe it was that Harry had brought them home.</p><p>In fifth year, he’d agonized over what he’d learned about his father—that he’d been arrogant, even a bully. Now he thought it gave him a clearer idea of James Potter to know the person he’d left behind. Knowing that James’s bravery and fierce loyalty had remained when the ego had been punctured, knowing that Lily’s fierce disdain had given way to love, Harry could imagine them here. He saw them in the halls, laughing, joking, reading out letters from Remus or Sirius to each other. He saw them holding him as a baby.</p><p>Sometimes, in the nursery, he ran through lists of the day’s or week’s events as if he were recounting them to his mum and dad. He imagined a world where he could do such a thing in reality. In the days after Ron’s departure he’d gone so far as to feel like he was asking advice from the empty room. <em>Should I have done something differently? What do I do now?</em></p><p>It wasn’t that the room ever answered. It was just that in the nursery he felt older, somehow, more equipped to cope. He felt the sixteen years’ gulf between the child he’d been when Voldemort had marked him and the man he was now. He felt acutely aware of how his parents, too, had left Hogwarts and walked right into a war. It made them feel close, the fact that they, too, had had to make every decision under the shadow of Voldemort.</p><p>The thought wasn’t comforting, exactly. Often it reminded Harry of how far Voldemort’s influence stretched, flung over decades, over so many other lives cut short. And in the moments that Harry felt dwarfed by the enormity of his task, he left the nursery and returned to his room. He took the Marauder’s Map from under his pillow. He lowered his wandtip to the surface of the parchment and whispered, “I solemnly swear that I am up to no good.”</p><p>He scanned the page until he found Ginny. There she’d be, sitting in the Great Hall beside her friends, or by Neville in the Gryffindor Common Room, and Harry could practically close his eyes and imagine himself into a chair beside her. He’d remember the sweet red fall of her hair, the way her eyes crinkled when she laughed, the way she kicked off hard from the pitch during Quidditch practice, her daring smile.</p><p>Then he could reorient himself. He could remind himself that he, Hermione, and Draco were after the second Horcrux, that they had established a headquarters, that they weren’t as adrift as he sometimes felt.</p><p>Of course, Hermione and Draco didn’t exactly help him miss Ginny <em>less</em>.</p><p>At first Harry had thought he was imagining it. He’d thought he was going mad for even considering it. After all, it wasn’t like Hermione was so inclined toward forgiveness. She’d asked <em>Cormac McLaggen </em>to Slughorn’s party last year because she was so angry with Ron, for Merlin’s sake—and this was Draco Malfoy, who had six years’ worth of ill will behind him.</p><p>But then Harry started to notice certain things, and once he spotted them, they seemed to build toward something.</p><p>For instance, whenever Harry brought up Remus and Tonks to discuss where they could be hiding, Hermione became oddly quiet. But a minute or two into the topic, Draco would say something like, “It’s too bad you didn’t just let us die in there, Granger, or those two could still be happily pretending to follow the Death Eaters.” Or, “I’ve heard working as a Junior Auror is a nightmare even at the best of times, so really we’ve done Tonks a favor.” And Hermione would smile, and soon thereafter, she would become more animated, contributing to the discussion. It was subtle enough that Harry didn’t even recognize it for a while—that Draco was casually, constantly reiterating that Hermione had done what needed to be done, that she’d had no choice, that she had no reason now to take the blame.</p><p>Or sometimes Hermione would go into spirals of doubt or worry. Even after six years, Harry hadn’t really developed a strategy for dealing with this. That was just Hermione, he and Ron had always said—when she lost her head over exam preparation, they gave her time and space. Every so often they’d go as far as to tell her she was being ridiculous and that of course she would pass with the highest possible marks.</p><p>But these days, when Hermione started fretting about what could have happened to Ron, or what Remus would do during full moons while on the run, or about how they would care for Tonks’s baby, of course Harry couldn’t tell her she was being ridiculous, so he was at a loss. All he could do was commiserate, and the weight of his own worry just exacerbated the spiral.</p><p>But when Hermione started asking these hypotheticals, Draco would say something offhand like, “Well, if <em>I </em>were pregnant in a cave with a werewolf husband, I’d start getting things ready ahead of time. You know. Transfiguring leaves into rags, that sort of thing.” And he’d give Hermione a glance and say, “What would you do?”</p><p>And Hermione, taken aback, would start problem-solving. She’d start speaking about how she’d actually read an interesting book about Wizarding approaches to pregnancy last year, and most of the charms involved for pain relief were relatively basic. Or she’d say that she supposed if Remus and Tonks <em>were</em> staying in a cave at the full moon, Tonks could take away Remus’s wand and Transfigure a stone barrier for the duration of the night to keep herself safe, because after all, while werewolves had disproportionate strength to most wolves, there <em>was</em> a limit to their physical power, as researched by Bellham and Duke in 1968.</p><p>“Oh, Duke,” Draco said after she mentioned that particular fact. “That’s the same family who founded Honeydukes.”</p><p>“Is it?” Hermione said, caught off-guard.</p><p>“Yeah, it was a pair of brothers, I think. The older brother was this prizewinning creature specialist and the younger one graduates from Hogwarts and starts a candy shop. Not even a shop, I mean, it was this pathetic little stall at first. And the whole family thought the younger brother was a real lost cause and would never amount to anything. That’s the story, anyway.”</p><p>“I wonder if Fred and George were inspired by that,” Hermione said thoughtfully.</p><p>And suddenly they were speaking about something other than the possibilities of capture, interrogation, or murder. Honestly, Harry didn’t know how Draco was doing it.</p><p>What he <em>did </em>know was that, more and more often, he saw Hermione giving Draco furtive looks, looking soft and unsure. He recognized that look. It was the same kind he’d tried so hard not to give Ginny last year, when he’d spent so many nights worrying about how Ron would react.</p><p>Harry wondered if Hermione was worrying about what he might think.</p><p>At first, of course, the idea had been bizarre, even unpalatable. He felt as if he’d spent half his life waiting for Hermione to wind up with Ron, after all, to wait for the fights to stop and the timing to wind up right.</p><p>But the longer he sat with the idea, the more he realized, somewhat to his own surprise, that he didn’t have strong feelings about something happening between the two of them. He knew none of the Order would have agreed—he could almost imagine Mrs. Weasley’s outraged sputtering and Fred and George’s fascinated disgust. But none of them would have understood, would they? None of them could know the feeling of being at headquarters together and focused on the Horcrux hunt, living in this tiny oasis of trust in an ever-expanding wash of paranoia and despair.</p><p>He trusted Hermione. In a different, but not insubstantial way, he trusted Draco, too. Their lives were their own. Maybe this was part of the war, a desperate search for connection and understanding wherever they could find it; maybe it was a passing thing; maybe not. Harry didn’t know the reason and he didn’t feel like he needed to. He couldn’t have explained why he’d fallen for Ginny, after all. All he knew was the longing that yawned in him when he saw her name upon the page. He couldn’t have explained why, those afternoons, he walked upstairs to the nursery and stood before the crib. All he knew was the frisson of warmth and awareness that came through him like a static shock. The lives they had were such little things. Harry would rather feel than explain.</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>This fic was written for <a href="https://archiveofourown.org/users/SillySparrow/pseuds/SillySparrow">SillySparrow</a> :)</p></blockquote></div></div>
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